The video linked in another comment here said that she had been trying to film it for a year, but they only run the loop when there is an event going on at the convention center. Seems like that ought to depress the numbers massively.
Those numbers aren’t possible literally anywhere else. Silver line phase II extension carried about 1.1 million people over six months. That’s the marquee project of the DC metro system—the only thing it has focused on building over the last decade (to the detriment of the rest of the system). Boring Company’s little demo carried a meaningful fraction as many passengers as that $3 billion dollar, decade-in-the-making transit project.
Is it a meaningful fraction? What is the theoretical daily capacity of the Boring Company tunnels vs. the DC silver line extension? Even at this meager capacity, we’ve already heard reports of traffic in the tunnels.
Why are we comparing a system that just has 4 stops on the Las Vegas Convention Center campus plus one at a nearby hotel to the much much much larger entire NYC subway system?
Sure, let's compare it per station. According to Wikipedia, NYC has 5.2 million daily riders and 472 stations [1] for an average of 11,000 riders per station per day — over 26x more than the Las Vegas Loop stations have been accommodating. Even if you adjust for population differences (LV ~600k, NYC ~8m) the Las Vegas Loop does significantly worse.
That still seems questionable to me because they are completely different kinds of systems.
The NYC system is serving an entire city with stops near a large number of businesses of all kinds. It's a system that almost anyone in the city might have reason to use.
The LV system has stops at just two businesses (four at the convention center and one at a nearby hotel). It's a system that is only useful to people who need to move between locations at the convention center or between the convention center and that one hotel.
Is that really hard to believe? It’s shockingly low for public transit but seems an easy bar to clear.